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- President Biden made another gaffe as he confused a Congressional funding bill for Ukraine with NATO as he spoke to reporters while on vacation in Delaware
- He called for Congress to pass legislation to fund NATO instead of Ukraine
- It’s the latest verbal slip-up and comes following Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report suggested the president suffered from memory lapses
President Biden appeared to get his facts muddled once again on Saturday as he confused a Congressional funding bill for Ukraine with that of NATO.
Biden, who is on vacation in Delaware, was speaking to reporters as he walked from his motorcade when he got his facts confused as he called for ‘Congress to come home and pass the legislation funding NATO.’
The $95 billion aid package the president was speaking about would see $61 billion sent to Ukraine – which it not part of NATO.
The funding would be mainly in the form of military equipment from the U.S. It would also send foreign assistance and humanitarian aid to Israel, Gaza and allies in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan.
‘The idea that we’re going to walk away from Ukraine; the idea that we’re going to let NATO begin to split is totally against the idea of the United States of America,’ Biden began.
‘It is against our word and troops that we’ve sent over all the way back to Eisenhower. So it is about time Congress come home and pass the legislation funding NATO. It’s critical,’ he said, mixing up Ukraine for the organization.
It is the latest verbal gaffe made by the president who recently mixed up the names of world leaders, including France’s former president Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, with its current president, Emmanuel Macron.
Last week he attempted to deliver a powerful defense of himself and his mental fitness, slamming a report by Special Counsel Robert Hur that suggested his memory was failing.
Hur’s description of Biden caused alarm when he said in his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that he was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’.
Investigators who quizzed Biden said that his memory ‘appeared to have significant limitations’ and he ‘did not remember, even within several years. when his son Beau died’. (It was in 2015). Biden could also not remember when he was Vice President or the details of a debate about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, they said.
Biden swiftly compounded the damage by giving a press conference in which he petulantly defended his cognitive powers.
After apparently finishing the question-and-answer portion of the appearance, he made for the door before being tempted back to answer one more inquiry about Israel.
All the headlines focused on what came next as he confused the presidents of Egypt and Mexico in a conversation about Gaza. It’s the kind of gaffe he has become known for.
Biden referred to the president of Mexico as El-Sisi. In fact, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is the president of Egypt.
A hastily-arranged press conference to hit back at what he said was a ‘gratuitous’ report had backfired.
Hur’s account has given Biden’s rival Donald Trump and Republicans plenty to work with when it comes to attacking the president’s suitability for a second term.
Hur said if Biden were to be charged in the wrongful storage of classified document at his Delaware home, a jury might be sympathetic toward him.
One particularly damaging passage that Hur included said: ‘In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’),’ according to the report.
‘He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.’
Biden erupted at that passage in the now infamous, defiant press conference where he insisted his memory is ‘fine.’
‘There’s even reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that? I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone, to remind me of when he passed away,’ the president told reporters.
‘Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damned business.’
Asked about the ‘elderly man’ language, Biden said: ‘I’m well meaning and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’m the president and I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation it’s totally out of [order].’
More recently he has mixed up other world leaders and misstated when conversations with long-dead political figures took place.
Biden twice recalled a conversation with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl about the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill, at the G7 summit in 2021 – despite Khol being dead since 2017.
Other ‘I see dead people’ confusions include mixing up British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, deceased Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski, and the inventor of insulin who died before Biden was born.
Last year he declared that Russian Vladimir Putin was ‘clearly losing the war in Iraq’, instead of Ukraine.
Biden’s long-established reputation for embarrassing gaffes and mis-statements – in 2018 even he described himself as a ‘gaffe machine’ – has in one sense benefited him up until now, allowing his team to explain away mistakes as his Uncle Joe folksy, goofy charm.
But the dramatically increased frequency of his verbal stumbles is causing alarm. And it has been accompanied by evidence of physical frailty, too.
Since 2021 he has reportedly tripped eight times while navigating the steps of Air Force One, the presidential jet, including three times on a single flight to Atlanta.
In 2022 he fell off a bicycle after getting caught up in his pedals; in 2023 he stumbled descending a small set of steps at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan; later that year he tripped over a sand bag and fell on stage at an Air Force academy graduation ceremony.
And when the stairs to Air Force One were shortened last year so that he entered the plane at a lower level, Biden tripped on them, too.
When he was vice president, he tripped as he walked on stage to deliver a speech at the Paddington Town Hall in Sydney in July 2016.
In September 2022 he appeared to get lost while walking off stage following his remarks at the Global Fund Conference.
As applause ensued, the U.S. president began walking off the stage before abruptly stopping in his tracks and looking around with an appearance of confusion on his face.
He then seemed to ask people on the ground how to get off stage and did a few stuttering steps.
Sleepy Joe – as he was dubbed by Trump – is already easily the oldest person to become president in US history.
If he reclaims the White House, he would be 82 at the start of his second term in January 2025. (If Trump wins, he would be 78.)
Biden’s latest gaffes only serve to add fuel to those calling for him to be dumped as a new poll suggests Democrats would perform better in the upcoming presidential election without him.
Analysis by former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, shared with The Mail on Sunday, puts 81-year-old Biden, who is running for re-election as President in November, on 40 per cent among US voters, the same as Trump.
But when the voters are offered a choice between Trump, 77, the frontrunner to be his Republican challenger, and ‘a Democrat other than Joe Biden’, the notional candidate leads by six points. Biden would beat Nikki Haley, Trump’s last-remaining rival for the Republican nomination, by 11 points.
Even though the two men are tied in the 10,000-sample poll, the American electorate thinks the momentum is with Trump: just 28 per cent think that Biden will win re-election, compared with 38 per cent who expect Trump to return to the White House.
The results have been released amid growing concerns about the mental capacity of President Biden, who is the oldest person ever to occupy the Oval Office.
The concerns are reflected in the President’s approval ratings: only 37 per cent of US voters approve of his handling of the Presidency, compared with 58 per cent who disapprove – which includes a quarter of those who voted for him in 2020. Young voters are particularly disenchanted, with 64 per cent of the 18-24 bracket disapproving.
Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups found that many of Biden’s supporters in 2020 had backed him only as the means of removing Trump.
The Biden/Trump battle is polarizing the country along lines of race, gender and demography.
Trump leads among men, the under-35s, white voters and high-school dropouts, and on issues such as immigration, defense, the economy, taxes, crime and the cost of living.
Biden leads among women, the over-65s, black voters and degree-holders on healthcare and the environment.
Pessimism hangs over the race: two-thirds of voters think that America is headed in the wrong direction, which rises to 86 per cent among Trump supporters.
Trump – the first former President in US history to face criminal indictments – is facing a total of 91 charges across four separate cases, including payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and allegations that he illegally conspired to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, railed against the judge who slapped him with a $355 million fine in his New York civil fraud trial and went after the long list of prosecutors with cases against him as he campaigned in Michigan on Saturday night while facing penalties that could exceed half-a-billion dollars.
Trump was making his pitch in a state that is expected to be critical in November as he pivots toward a likely general election rematch against Biden.
While Biden narrowly beat Trump there in 2020, the president is facing deep skepticism in the state, especially from Arab-American voters angry over his support for Israel in the Israel-Hamas war as the Palestinian death toll has climbed.
Trump has been working to appeal to the blue-collar and union voters who were critical to his victory in 2016.
On Saturday, he again made his pitch to auto workers, railing against electric vehicle mandates that he argues will ultimately lead to lost jobs and touted tariffs he put in place.
‘We have to let them know a freight train is coming in November,’ Trump told more than 2,000 supporters gathered in a freezing plane hangar in Waterford Township, in the suburbs of Detroit.
But Trump was again most focused on his grievances, opening with a 15-minute screed about the criminal and civil cases against him.
‘These repulsive abuses of power are not just an attack on me, they’re really an attack on you and all Americans,’ Trump said on Saturday. ‘We’re all in this mess together!’
Trump, 77, has also had his own senior moments.
Earlier this week he claimed that he ‘purposely’ mixed up rival Nikki Haley and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when he was campaigning in New Hampshire last month, as he used Haley’s name instead of Pelosi’s as he argued the Democratic speaker should be held more responsible for what happened at the Capitol on January 6.
‘When I interpose – because I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan – and when I purposely interpose names, they said I didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki, tricky Nikki, he didn’t know,’ Trump said.
‘I interpose and they make a big deal out of it, I said, “No, no I think they both stink, they have something in common, they both stink.”‘
‘And remember this, when I make a statement like that about Nikki that means she will never be running for vice president,’ the ex-president added to cheers.
Trump also continued to claim he purposely subbed in President Barack Obama’s name for Biden’s, blaming the ‘dishonest people’ in the media and complaining it’s ‘very hard to be sarcastic.’
‘When I say Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States – meaning, there is a lot of control there, because the one guy can’t put two sentences together. So I say Barack Hussein Obama,’ Trump explained.
Both Haley, 52, and President Joe Biden’s campaign, have pointed out Trump’s recent flubs – as she’s long argued the country is ready for a new generation of leadership.
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